In order to provide an hostility-free forum where everyone feels welcome and encouraged to learn programming and share their art, there are some guidelines you must follow in order to keep a good forum atmosphere:

#1 - The rules or lack thereof apply to all forum users when they use CodeWalrus discussion mediums, regardless of user skills, member rank, religion, country, views and friendships with other TI community individuals. Playing the victim by yourself or on someone's behalf when reprimanded is also disallowed.

#2 - Being rude, intolerant, provocative, manipulating or trying to start drama are disallowed under any circumstances. There are other ways to express your opinion.

#3 - Discussing or sharing advice or files dedicated for cheating on tests and exams, as well as the sharing of malicious content, private information (including responding to private messages in public without the sender's permission), illegal (ROMs, warez, etc) and adult material is strictly prohibited. Such content or links to it will be removed from your posts.

#4 - Flood, blatant advertising, spam and disruptive behavior are not allowed, same for abusive swearing, be it overused or directed at other users. Accounts created solely to advertise will be immediately deleted or see their privileges reduced.

#5 - Double-posting is heavily discouraged, unless it has been 24 hours or that it's a project update requiring an early topic bump. The "Modify" button exists for a reason.

#6 - Do not abuse the post rating system, such as by mass-downvoting a user for liking the color green. Also, ideally, upvoting should be for quality contributions and downvoting for rule-breaking content.

#8 - There is a 24-hour clause on verbal warnings received via PMs. If you get reprimanded for breaking the rules via PM on IRC or the forums, then after 24 hours it is automatically assumed that you have read the message.

#9 - You can use English, French and Dutch on the forums, but if the topic is not in English then the language must be specified in the title.

#10 - If a forum member never breaks the rules, but it becomes clear that he constantly behaves at the very limit of bannability or that he is testing the rules non-stop (eg finding loopholes), then he can still be warned for it. Long hiatuses from the forum will not erase past warnings.

Extra advice for a good forum experience:

I - This forum welcomes users of any programming language or platform, as well as fans of any game, show or music genre, and it tries to promote creativity.

II - The forum software automatically limits signatures size, but even if it meets the restrictions, anything deemed too intrusive or flashy will be removed. Please keep your signature small.

III - Reprimanding an user for breaking the rules might be tolerated, but it's highly advised to use the post rating system and "Report to Moderator" options whenever possible, as it is the most effective.

IV - Searching before asking questions will make it easier for people to help you.

V - Moderator decisions are taken in group in a private sub-forum, unless an emergency forces a premature action. We will never delete a post (except illegal, private info and adult content, but not the entire post) unless requested by many people. If you need to contact the admins privately, PM them or use a d m i n -AT- c o d e w a l r . u s (-AT- being @) e-mail address.

XXXIV - If something exists, then there's a walrus of it.

IRC-specific rules:

#1 - No bots are allowed into the channels unless approved by the staff. In that case the bot will get voice in the channels it is allowed into and it will be exempted from flood protection. Make sure your bot implements its own mechanism to avoid attacks. #cw-spam is exempted from this rule

#2 - The spam channel is not a flood channel. Flood protection will remain enabled in there. Its main reason to exist is for testing and playing with bots.

#3 - Please be nice and avoid spoilers in the anime channel, if you want to post spoilers, use IRC colors to give both the text and background the same color. People who want to read it can highlight the text with the mouse.

For the sake of transparency, here is how banning is currently setup on the forums:

-There is now a new forum user group called "Restricted". If, after warnings, an user continues to break the rules, then he will be put in that group instead of regular members. Restricted will not restrict him from posting, but any forum post he makes will have to be manually approved by a moderator (meaning that forum users will not see what he posts until it has been screened by the staff first). In addition, that user will not be able to send PMs, add/edit/delete polls nor edit his profile (except account settings). Of course, if it's clear that the user only uses the website to cause trouble, then he will be banned outright (IP, account, e-mail, etc). This group is to make it so that offenders can still have a chance to contribute constructive content to the forums.

-Since it's impossible to setup IRC to have posts manually approved by a moderator, then we will skip straight to IRC temporary bans if warnings do not work.

-For some offenses, it can be hard to get an official warning (for example, double-posting will just lead to staff asking you not to do it, while site hacking will get you permbanned outright), but official warnings go as follows: 1st offense: Warning. Depending of the offense, this warning can expire after several months, but it cannot expire more than once. 2nd offense: Warning 3rd offense: 1 week ban. A probation period of 1 month follows afterwards. 4th offense: Permanent ban if probation period is still active and warning if it's not. 5th offense or site vandalism: Permanent ban

-In case of emergencies where a situation would get out of control and requires banning before the situation can be brought up to other admins, the ban will not be made official and will be removed immediately if the other admins are against it.

Other info:

-Warnings may be given publicly or via PM. We ask users to report objectionable content to make our job easier.

-This topic is open for discussions in case you have questions, concerns (other than drama starting) and suggestions. If anything isn't clear, then feel free to ask below.

I think Omni had one but it was only used once. Maybe it was even just set on a single member. Invisionfree also had it. Typically people just ban if they have to restrict members. The current setup is more as a compromise to the fact the current board rules might restrict people's free speech (although technically they can still post what they want, it's just that there can be consequences for some stuff). Some users might just be unable to do much effort to restrain themselves from being rude , for example, but might still be willing to continue posting positive contributions, so that's where that feature comes into play.

In general, CodeWalrus is stricter toward provocative remarks and the bar at which something is considered intolerance is lower. For example, if an user over here tried to restrict somebody from talking about moe girls in particular or bash him for doing so or restrict reddit screenshots posting that are SFW it would be considered intolerance (as in closed-mindedness towards specific hobbies) under our policies and be a bannable offense if done repeatedly. Of course it depends if people are flooding/spamming, though (for example if someone posts image macro or Youtube links every 10 second for long periods of time). The 1st site rule about rules/lack thereof applying to everyone is to prevent, for example, some religious extremist from whining about someone using the word Christmas or people from thinking that just because someone is a long-time and expert community figure then he is entitled to break the rules as he sees fit without consequences.

Bump, that reminds me I still need to update the first post of this topic with the dutch rules and eventually write French ones.

Also, to clarify on rule #4 about advertising, I would like to make it clear that while blatant advertising is not allowed (eg posting only to lure people into buying products or signing up to another service or website), other websites might have plenty of useful downloads and help of any sort for our visitors and members, and there are members who will prefer one site to another. In no way shall CodeWalrus staff or its members use personal bias to silence or discourage other users from mentionning one or more site names or links in particular. The only exception is if the said site hosts illegal content such as copyrighted MP3s and paid softwares offered for free, but even then, if the website is programming enthusiasts community or archives we will try to only censor direct links to the offending content and links to directories containing such content.

Also, regarding rule #1 and 2, I want to remind every visitor and user that what is being posted on CodeWalrus by our members and staff does not necessarily represent CodeWalrus nor its administration as a whole. If anyone has a problem with something said by one or more website members on the forums or IRC, then we heavily encourage you to stick around anyway and see if reporting the issue to a website staff (those in green-colored nicknames) might address the problem. And most importantly, the majority of our fanbase, as well as the entire CodeWalrus staff, do not speak English as their native language, so we encourage members to not jump to conclusions about what people said nor their intentions.

So I finally read the rules....I just checked that box on sign up (I often skip reading terms and conditions, if I don't spend money on the service e.g. Amazon, XBox Live (not paid, but still), Strato Webhosting, ...) ).Sorry for that

No one reads the terms and conditions, in fact it would take years reading them all (especially Apple's and Microsoft's EULAs, I wonder how big it would be when printed out), no one would read the entire corpus of laws of your country, even lawyers struggles to do so, no one likes to get anything forced from anyone either (like some forums do when they desperately try to shove the rules on the face of every user), we're not that desperate, but it's very recommended to read a forum's rules not only to avert bad surprises, but also to keep life on the forum pretty friendly.

Actually, Microsoft has been made reable by humans, but I feel that some writing figures they used are quite... I dunno, they says multiple times thngs like "such as", but never give the whole list of cases they could use your data for instance.